


Ineffable Love

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Annoyed Crowley, Annoying Aziraphale, Ineffable Love, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 04:49:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19805095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: Triggered by a quote from Tennant, that Crowley absolutely loves Aziraphale--and finds this very annoying.So. Crowley being annoyed and in love for six millennia.





	Ineffable Love

Tennant: “But then Crowley absolutely loves Aziraphale. He hates that he loves him. It’s really annoying for him.”

<http://www.david-tennant.co.uk/2018/10/good-omens-david-tennant-michael-sheen.html>

It was like six thousand years with a burr up your bum. An itch you couldn’t scratch. It was like having a perfect goth outfit planned only to find yourself in a rush. So there you were, out in public, in black boots and black jeans and a black T…but you hadn’t found the right jacket and in the end you’d grabbed and run. Now you were pimped out with a rose colored brocade from the seventeen hundreds, looking ever so Laura Ashley.

That was what it was like adoring Aziraphale.

It wasn’t that he minded adoring him. He loved Angel. His own angel. But why did his angel have to be so… so…

It made him want to pull his hair out.

Magic, he thought in dark despair. His angel—his Angel—loved magic. Not proper “snap your fingers and disappear a bastard” magic. No. Not even the clever stuff: Penn and Teller would have made sense. But Aziraphale loved the cornball, barely amateur stuff you’d learn from the Boy’s Big Book of Magic Tricks. And he did even that so very badly.

It should have been humiliating for Aziraphale…but, no. Instead it was humiliating for Crowley, who was tangled up in anguish for his idiot friend, and worse anguish at how much—how painfully much—he himself adored said-same idiot as he spewed cards from every possible hiding place, murdered (and reanimated) entire flocks of doves, and lost stage-shy rabbits who refused to come out of hollow tables, all the while radiating such sweet, innocent enthusiasm it broke the demon’s heart and resurrected it anew.

His angel. His lunatic, darling angel, who of all Heaven’s Host seemed to be the only one to take God at Her word, and to love the world with a bewildered, aching tenderness.

During bad centuries he would lecture himself at length. Take the 14th Century. He’d spent half that century claiming credit with Hell for so very many things. (They’d been so damnably gullible! The black plague he might, at a pinch, have imported to Europe. But they’d let him claim the start of the Little Ice Age, for the love of…for the hate of… Damn. For the love of little green apples!) And through it all his angel, watching the world collapse and doing what he could. Which thanks to Heaven was damn all of any use.

He’d found Aziraphale one day outside London, with the babies. Two babies, clearly unrelated. Dead as dead could be.

“I was going to take them to a convent,” he had said, voice empty. Then, as though Crowley could not be counted on to work out the obvious, “They were alive, then.” He ducked his head, and almost whispered. “I spent a number of miracles on them. But it began to feel cruel. Die—resurrect. Die—resurrect. I…”

Angel had gagged, then, and shivered.

Crowley had disappeared the wicker basket holding the two tiny corpses, and when Angel had protested had insisted it was clean, quiet, and so much better than burying the poor things in the cold, soaked ground. Then he’d bundled Aziraphale up and dragged him to a tavern, where the angel had put away the better part of a cask of apple brandy.

That night, centuries later, still seemed a perfect example of why he still hated the 14th Century. Crowley had stood watch over the fair little sweetheart of a Principality, muttering under his breath.

“I should have known better. I should have seen it. ‘Oooh, I gave my flaming sword away. The lass was up the duff and the poor lad hadn’t a clue about anything, from fucking to fig leaves, and as for any real notion of how to get on in the world, well…’ Why do I have to chat up the one angel in creation who does things like that? What is wrong with me? I could be in Hell right now telling Hastur how I broke the heart of one of Heaven’s minions. I could have pointed out the obvious—that God killed those two babies and God kept them dead and God brought the plague and God brought the famine and God brought the cold…and God isn’t about to change Her mind, and what kind of good God is that? But no. Not me. Instead I’m here playing mother hen to… To…”

To his own, his perfect, his gentle little angel, who was everything God promised and failed to deliver. The real thing.

Love. His angel was love. Dithering, distractible, innocent, ingénue love—but love from the top of his tousled head to the tip of his well-shod toes.

That night he’d paced, and cursed, and muttered, and snarled…and every time Aziraphale had started to rouse, moaning in weary grief for a tortured world, he’d soothed him, and stroked his wild curls, and eased him back into sleep.

“Rest, Angel. You need it, poor lad…”

Seven hundred years later— _seven hundred years later!_ —and he could still feel the damp, sweaty curls under the pads of his fingers, and see the tears seeping from Aziraphale’s closed eyes, a slick sheen in the flicker of the tavern torches. Seven hundred years and he still wanted to reach back in time and pull his angel in, wrap him warm, tent him under protective wings, and do what he had not then, and still could not manage to do: speak to him softly, tenderly, reassuringly. But no…

Crowley was a laughing crow of a demon. He was stroppy and sarky, a jester, a fool. He was a demon. The vocabulary of love was not in him.

It wasn’t fair. He should have fallen in love with someone like Gabriel. There would have been infinite time for the snarl and snap between the two. Infinite time for a courtship that blended wit and loathing. He could have lusted for the idiot’s brawny thews without aching over his silly little hoarder’s bookshop, crammed to bursting with first editions and kitschy tchotchkes—because Gabriel would never, never in a billion years keep a tatty little bookstore in Soho. Gabriel would never invite Crowley to a wonderful little sushi place in Brixton. Gabriel would never grow slowly drunk with him over the tragedy of the fragile little human lives around them. Gabriel would never sober up with him, making adorable scrunchy faces and running his tongue like a cat who’s just eaten mashed cabbage…

At which point Crowley had to admit he would never have come to love Gabriel, because the most annoying thing of all about his Angel was that he loved his angel for every single annoying, flawed, funny, kindly weirdness he displayed. He loved him for bow ties and for tartan collars. For refusing to provide Holy Water rather than let Crowley die—and for providing it after all, because he couldn’t let Crowley get hurt trying. He loved his peculiar little angel for being so much better at angel-ing than God seemed to manage God-ing, and Satan seemed to manage Satan-ing, and certainly so much better than he, himself, Crowley, seemed to manage demon-ing. Because in the end, Aziraphale was in every detail what Crowley hoped an angel would be.

How could he not adore an angel who lost track of pop music trends, while still adoring music? Good music! Or who nibbled on pastries like a mouse sucking up sugar and hashish, with a blitzed smile on his face and a ready offer of another pastry just like it for Crowley? How could he not adore Aziraphale’s desperate attempt to be a good and obedient angel, forever falling apart as his loving spirit demanded he do what was right and compassionate, rather than what was ordained?

How could he avoid loving the sweet little honey pot sitting on a park bench lecturing the ducks on greed—and he the plumpest and greediest of all present?

Six thousand years since he had met Aziraphale on the ramparts of Eden. _Six thousand years._ For six thousand years he’d been embarrassed, horrified, infuriated, shocked—and completely infatuated.

It was unforgivable, he thought, scowling…

And, thinking that, he served Aziraphale another perfect Ritz scone, and poured him a fresh cup of tea. Because, really, there was nothing in Heaven, and Hell, and Earth in between that he adored more than he adored his own, his very own Angel.


End file.
